Anthropic Raises $65 Billion at a $965 Billion Valuation, Surpassing OpenAI

Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H funding round on Thursday, valuing the AI safety company at $965 billion and placing it above OpenAI as the most valuable artificial intelligence company in the world. The announcement arrived alongside a revenue disclosure that underscored why investors are competing for access at almost any price: Anthropic reported a revenue run rate of $47 billion, up from $30 billion earlier this year and $10 billion at the end of 2024.

The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, and includes $15 billion of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, among them $5 billion from Amazon. The valuation nearly triples the $380 billion figure Anthropic carried out of its Series G in February, making it one of the fastest valuation accelerations in private market history.

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OpenAI, which closed a $122 billion round in March at an $852 billion valuation, has now been surpassed by the company co-founded by its own former chief scientist.

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The Revenue Engine Behind the Valuation

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The $965 billion figure is not being driven by speculation about future potential. It is being priced against a revenue trajectory that has few precedents in private technology company history.

Anthropic's annualised revenue grew from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion by May 2026. Enterprise and startup API calls continue to drive the majority of revenue through pay-per-token pricing. Over 1,000 customers now spend more than $1 million annually on Claude, double the figure from two months prior. The number of customers spending over $100,000 annually has grown seven times in the past year.

The product most responsible for the acceleration is Claude Code. Launched as a standalone product in February 2025 and made generally available in May 2025, Claude Code reached $1 billion in annualised revenue by November 2025 and $2.5 billion by February 2026, with that figure more than doubling again in the months since. Enterprise use accounts for over half of Claude Code revenue, with customers including Netflix, Spotify, KPMG, L'Oréal, and Salesforce.

The AI coding assistant market has become the clearest near-term commercial application of frontier AI, and Anthropic's position within it explains why the valuation conversation shifted from whether $380 billion was justified to whether $1 trillion is achievable within the current funding cycle.

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The Competitive Context

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The valuation crossing above OpenAI is the headline, but the more significant shift is in how the competitive dynamic between the two companies is being framed by investors and analysts.

OpenAI retains the largest consumer install base through ChatGPT and significant enterprise penetration through its Microsoft integration. Its $852 billion valuation from March reflected those advantages alongside its dominant public profile in the AI category.

Anthropic's gross margins have improved to over 70%, a figure that reflects both the premium pricing its enterprise customers pay and the efficiency gains from operating with a smaller compute footprint relative to revenue than OpenAI. The company is spending significantly less on compute per dollar of revenue, a metric that matters as investors shift from pricing on revenue multiples to pricing on the underlying economics of the AI infrastructure business.

The Series H also includes a strategic dimension that goes beyond capital. 100,000 customers are running Claude on Amazon Bedrock as of April 2026, cementing AWS as the primary infrastructure partner. Anthropic also signed a deal with SpaceX to access compute capacity at xAI's Colossus data center in Memphis, diversifying its compute relationships at a moment when GPU availability remains a constraint across the frontier AI market.

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What the Round Is For

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CFO Krishna Rao, who has become one of the most closely watched executives in AI as the architect of Anthropic's capital strategy, stated in Thursday's press release that the funding will support serving historic demand, staying at the research frontier, and bringing Claude to more of the places where work happens.

The three priorities map directly to the three things Anthropic needs capital for. Serving historic demand requires compute infrastructure at a scale that grows with the revenue trajectory. Staying at the research frontier requires the training runs that produced Claude Opus 4.8, released the same day as the funding announcement, and the ongoing investment in pre-training research that the recent hire of Andrej Karpathy is designed to accelerate. Bringing Claude to more places where work happens describes the product expansion beyond the API and Claude Code into tools like Cowork, the desktop automation product targeting non-developer enterprise users.

A potential IPO as early as October 2026 has been reported, with the Series H representing the likely final private round before that process begins. The capital raise at $965 billion establishes a pricing anchor for the public market valuation conversation.

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The Broader Signal

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The speed of Anthropic's valuation progression, from $183 billion in September 2025 to $380 billion in February 2026 to $965 billion in May 2026, is a measure of how quickly the market's assessment of frontier AI's commercial potential has shifted in a single year.

The valuation has increased approximately 16 times in 14 months. The revenue has grown roughly 45 times in the same window. In a market where most technology companies trade at revenue multiples in the single digits, Anthropic is being priced at a multiple that reflects not the business it has today but the business investors believe it is building toward, in a category where the total addressable market is being defined in real time.

The investor competition for the round has been unusually intense even by 2026 standards. Multiple reports in the weeks before closing documented venture firms making preemptive offers at higher valuations than the company was initially seeking, a dynamic that reflects both the scarcity of allocation in top-tier AI rounds and the perception that the current window to invest at sub-trillion valuations is closing faster than anticipated.